Things move slow in Florida, especially down in the Keys, swampy and tropical and swaddled in salty breezes. But there’s something attractive about that slowness, isn’t there? Something arresting about the creeping way that darkness can invade these balmy backwaters? Well, Netflix hopes so. Because the streaming service’s new series Bloodline, which premieres tomorrow, definitely needs some time to seep into your veins. But once it has, it’s hard to shake.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a fellow entertainment-writer type, and she said she hated Bloodline, just thought it was so dull and puffed-up. She’d only seen the first episode, had decided not to watch beyond that, and I totally understand why. The first episode of Bloodline, which was created by Glenn Kessler, Todd A. Kessler, and Daniel Zelman, the devious minds behind Damages, is pretty tortured, the show trying really hard to convince us that the unlikable family at the show’s center, the fabulous Rayburns of the Keys, is worth caring about. They’re a rich family, pillar-of-the-community types who run a humble resort hotel on their little spit of bright beach. Parents Robert and Sally, played by Sam Shepard and Sissy Spacek, accept their power in the kind of faux-sheepish, “Who, me?” way that Diane Keaton does in The Family Stone. Which isn’t good.

The whole Rayburn family is reminiscent of that movie, the cozy/chilly tale of a bunch of utter nightmares whom we’re supposed to love for some reason. In its first episode, Bloodline similarly strains to create a credible, naturalistic family dynamic, adult siblings squabbling and worrying obsessively about mom, forced to carefully dole out bits of backstory exposition that the audience can start piecing together. It fumbles for believability and frustratingly doesn’t get there, not helped by the fact that the fine actors playing siblings—Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini, Ben Mendelsohn, and Norbert Leo Butz—seem in no way related. Everyone’s trying really hard for a Great Family drama, about a noble clan brought to ruin by various classical themes. But it’s too easy to find their attempts at greatness downright annoying. In this first episode, Bloodline is too moody, too male, too transfixed by its own sense of weight. I don’t blame my colleague for jumping ship.

But! But. If you stick with Bloodline through Episode 3, which is as far as I’ve seen, I think many of you might become as hooked as I am. The show is set up, much like Damages, as an unfolding mystery, one whose end, or almost end, we already know. Someone’s dead and we gotta figure out how they got dead. So the show teases us, offering little glimpses of what’s to come and then drawing us back into the show’s present, when the family’s many tiny fractures are deepened and widened by the return of Mendelsohn’s black sheep, eldest son Danny. This family’s got trauma buried in the past, but Danny is the only one who seems comfortable addressing it. Which he doesn’t do in any direct sort of way. After the flurry of information in the pilot, Bloodline is economical with its backstory, meting out details in a painstaking way. Which can be frustrating, but by the end of the third episode, when everything we thought we knew has been slowly upended, the show has gained real narrative traction. I like its deliberate pace, its slyly laconic storytelling.

It’s also, much like Damages, a show that doesn’t forget anything. Little lies and half-truths, slights and minor betrayals, have a way of festering in the humidity. The series has a nice sense of build to it, an accumulation of secret histories that, it seems, will be thick as peat by the time the series reaches its end. And that’s promising enough for me. The show is heavy, and cumbersome, maybe too often weighed down by its own self-seriousness and ambition. But, still, it’s awfully intriguing.

Those actors who don’t seem like siblings, and the ones who play their parents, are mostly great, the standouts being Cardellini and Mendelsohn. In that third episode, they have a charged scene together that is tense and terrific, Cardellini’s character, a good kid who went to law school to please her parents, finally getting some filling out, as Mendelsohn reveals some darker shades. It’s also a treat whenever __ Chloë Sevigny__, playing a local gal with ties to Danny, shows up. She’s got the metallic edge this show needs. I worry that IMDb only credits her for three episodes, though. I hope the series has bigger plans for her.

This is clearly a series with big plans, it only remains to be seen how they come to fruition. I’m fully expecting to binge (oh, that just-about-overused word!) on the remaining 10 episodes this weekend. By the end, the series might have shifted completely away from what these early episodes indicate. Which sort of negates the value of reviewing the first few episodes (why send so few to us poor, hungry critics, Netflix?), but at least I can tell you that sticking with the show through its turgid first hour is well worth it. It’s an irresponsible thing to say, but I’m addicted, and I’d like you to be too. Here. Won’t you try some Bloodline?